960438

research-article2020
PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720960438Political TheoryGuha-Majumdar

Original Manuscript
Political Theory

Lyons and Tygers

1­–25
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
and Wolves, Oh My! sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0090591720960438
https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720960438
Human Equality and the journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

“Dominion Covenant” in
Locke’s Two Treatises

Jishnu Guha-Majumdar1

Abstract
This essay reads John Locke’s Two Treatises through its nonhuman animal
presences, especially the emblematic figures of cattle and “noxious
creatures” like “lyons,” “tygers,” and wolves. It argues that the real ground
of Lockean human equality is an ongoing practice of subjugating nonhuman
animals, and not any attribute of the human species as such. More specifically,
the Lockean social compact founded on this equality relies on a “dominion
covenant,” an existential “agreement” in which God lends the power of
dominion to man and any threats to this order require punishment. This
dynamic enables violence toward humans, in the name of their humanity, if
they do not properly exert their power of dominion. Critics have connected
Locke’s theory of property to indigenous dispossession and his theory of
punishment to carceral systems; both processes, I argue, intimately rely
on the dominion covenant. Lockean racism is the fulfillment of, and not a
deviation from, his account of human equality.

Keywords
John Locke, human equality, dominion, colonialism, punishment

1
Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Ontario, Kingston, ON, Canada

Corresponding Author:
Jishnu Guha-Majumdar, Department of Philosophy, Queen’s University, Ontario, John Watson
Hall, Kingston, ON, Canada K7L 3N6.
Email: JGuhaM@gmail.com
2 Political Theory 00(0)

In 1656, the Virginia House of Burgesses attempted to solve two recurring

problems—wolf predation on livestock and deteriorating relations with
indigenous peoples—through an act granting a cow to the “King or Great
Man” of any Indian group that brought eight wolf heads to colony officials.
Beyond hoping to cull the wolf population, the Burgesses believed that cows
would help convert and civilize the Indians.1
The two named animals bear much symbolic weight. Wolves have long
symbolized tyranny and ruthlessness in Western imaginations, while raising
cattle represented a properly English lifestyle to these elites, as historian
Virginia Anderson notes.2 Moreover, cows conveyed a meaning distinct from
other farm animals. Whereas horses encouraged mobility, which settlers
regarded as a problem with Indian society, and pigs, sheep, and goats were
too self-sufficient and low status, the routine management cows required
would encourage civilized behavior. The Burgesses, then, expected Indians
to cut off their own ostensibly wild, pack-based, and roaming “heads” for the
life of cowherders, sedentary and pastoralist.
The Burgesses’s desire to convert Indians to cattle-raising and enlist them
in a war on wolves foreshadows John Locke’s construction of civil society, a
few decades later, in his Two Treatises of Government.3 Scholarship on the
Two Treatises often elides its animal presences.4 This article shows that
attending to these animal figures reveals deep ties between human dominion
over animals and Locke’s notion of human equality. Locke’s human excep-
tionalism appears not just as an ideational presumption but requires a con-
tinual practice of domination to retroactively justify it. In other words, I
reverse the ordinary picture of Locke’s humanism; it is not that human equal-
ity legitimizes instrumentalizing nonhumans but that instrumentalizing non-
humans enables the idea of Lockean human equality.
I explore this dynamic through the concept of what I call the dominion
covenant. Engaging scholarship that emphasizes the importance of religion
in Locke’s thought, this concept shows animality’s crucial role in his political
theology. The dominion covenant is a presumed “pact” between God,
humans, and nonhuman creation; God is lord over men and lends them
dominion over animals, and any challenge, human or otherwise, to this order
must be punished. In the covenant, wolves and cows respectively represent
the state of war and incipient civil society. Wolves, and other “noxious brutes”
like “lyons” and “tygers,” violate the dominion covenant and must be elimi-
nated as the enemy of mankind par excellence, whereas cattle, the quintes-
sential sign of property and civilization, form the covenant’s basis. The
covenant, however, proves an unstable foundation for human equality due to
animality’s unruliness; securing it thus requires the ongoing domination of
animals to restore the order that the covenant guarantees. Subsequently, this
Guha-Majumdar 3

unstable foundation enables Locke’s political theory to justify violations of

human life, in the name of humanity, for failures to stay on the right side of
the dominion covenant.
The dominion covenant is not named as such in Locke’s text, and I do not
present it to unveil Locke’s “true” intentions. Rather, as a heuristic device, it
illuminates Locke’s political theory, particularly its racialized dimensions. It
might therefore seem similar to the “domination contract” tradition as articu-
lated by Charles Mills, which describes the mainstream social contract as a way
for the powerful to dominate others under the guise of inclusion and equality.5
As I will explain, however, the figure of a covenant, rather than a contract, best
describes human–animal relations insofar as the former’s status hovers between
reciprocal agreement and cosmological presumption. Animals play a unique
role because their domination sutures both Locke’s theological and political
concerns. Additionally, while the domination contract shows how Lockean uni-
versalism fails to live up to its promise, I suggest that the dominion covenant
works exactly as it should, albeit with significant unexamined consequences.
Lockean racism is not the failure but the product of Lockean human equality.
The first two sections examine the foundational role of nonhuman animals
in Locke’s political thought, especially in the First Treatise and The Essay on
Human Understanding. Section one examines a conundrum that Lockean
scholarship identifies in his concept of human equality; Locke appears to
resolutely presume human equality and collective superiority over nonhu-
mans while also troubling the idea that “the human species” can be a moral
category. The second section offers a new perspective on this problem: the
real substance of human equality is the sheer fact of dominating animals, a
dynamic I describe through the figure of the dominion covenant. The instabil-
ity of human equality thus enables violations of concrete human beings in the
name of abstract humanity, which the last two sections explore. Shifting to
the Second Treatise, these sections focus, respectively, on property and pun-
ishment—two essential aspects of Locke’s political theory. The violations of
human equality that scholars of settler colonialism and carcerality rightly
point to are not failures to live up to equality’s ideal but part of the dominion
covenant’s logic. I do not suggest abandoning all concepts of human equality,
but given that Locke offers one of the most developed theorizations of equal-
ity in the political theory canon, this discussion clarifies the limits of human
equality as a ground for a just political order.6

Locke and the Problematic of Human Equality

The character of Locke’s humanism, his declaration of what John Dunn calls
“the normative creaturely equality of all men in virtue of their shared
4 Political Theory 00(0)

species-membership,” appears rather straightforward.7 Locke declares that

natural law primarily entails preserving mankind (TT II.7),8 and that nothing
is more “evident” than “that Creatures of the same species and rank . . .
should also be equal” (TT II.4). Whereas, for example, early modern critics of
Hobbes charged him with bestializing humans by depicting them as “aban-
doned by God to a brutish and animalistic existence,” Locke frankly decrees
that humans have a privileged position in the world.9 Rather than base human-
ity’s natural condition on descriptive characteristics inferred from concrete
human behavior, Locke presents an image of humanity divinely “constructed
within and in relation to a larger created cosmos.”10
However, Locke’s work also features crossings between humans and other
animals that complicate this stark divide. Locke’s thought therefore travels
along two tracks; he simultaneously founds human equality on a decisive
break from nonhumans while also doubting the strict coherence of this break.
This doubt partly emerges when he contemplates the many ethically relevant
similarities between human and nonhuman animals. His Essay Concerning
Human Understanding denies that animals are Cartesian machines and
asserts that they use “some reason” (E 2.11.11);11 they partake, to some
extent, in faculties like perception, memory, comparison, and compounding
(E 2.9–2.11). Locke even credits rumors that some nonhuman animals can
speak and that humans can interbreed with mandrills (E 3.6.22–23). In his
Thoughts Concerning Education, Locke criticizes the “custom of eating too
much flesh” and suggests that children learn to care for animals and read
from Aesop’s animal fables in order to build a sense of compassion.12 This
text thus affectively entangles humans and animals by presenting animals as
similar enough to impart ethical lessons.13 Even Locke’s description of
human equality in the Two Treatises—that “Creatures of the same species and
rank” are “promiscuously born to all the same advantages of Nature, and the
use of the same faculties” (TT II.4; my italics)—seems confusing given the
wide differentiation in faculties he describes in this text and elsewhere.
Finally, some animal studies scholars find that Locke’s theory of labor justi-
fies animals’ property rights, like a squirrel’s right to its gathered acorns.14
While these examples suggest a blurrier line between human and nonhu-
man animal life, they still leave Lockean human exceptionalism largely
intact. However, other parts of the Essay do vitiate Locke’s foundationalist
commitment to equality within the human species. These arguments suggest
that “species”—both in the broad sense of “types of things” and in the narrow
sense of what we now call biological species—might not really exist.15
First, distinctions between species are merely constructed attempts to
order the varied substances that humans encounter. Categorizations of this
manifold of things are contrived “nominal” essences with no necessary
Guha-Majumdar 5

relationship to “real” essences. Though nature produces a wide variety of

similar beings and Locke believes in a hierarchy of creatures, “the sorting of
them under names is the workmanship of the understanding” (E 3.3.13; italics
in original). He commonly uses the category of “man” and other creaturely
species as an example. To say “this is a man, that a horse,” only “rank[s]
things under different specific names, as agreeing to those abstract ideas, of
which we have made those names the signs” (E 3.3.13). One may bundle
“voluntary motion, with sense and reason, joined to a body of a certain shape”
to form the idea of “man,” but this is not “the real essence and source of all
those operations which are to be found in any individual of that sort” (E
3.6.3). Further, there is no definitive way to judge among different definitions
of man—whether rational animal or featherless biped (E 3.10.17).
Second, border cases confound extant species categorizations. Nature
does not allow “gaps” but only blurry lines between animals, plants, and
inanimate objects (E 3.6.12). Locke refutes the idea that nature produces a
clear set of essences given the “irregular and monstrous births, that in divers
sorts of animals have been observed” (E 3.6.16). Finally, the ostensible exis-
tence of “changelings” and “monsters” muddles any hard lines drawn around
the human species (E 3.6.22).
Locke therefore faces a dilemma: whereas the Two Treatises roots politics
in a foundationalist account of human equality, his account of species else-
where “appears to knock away the foundation on which [he] purports to be
building.”16 He thus confronts one version of a challenge that contemporary
defenders of human equality must face: How do you root equality in a founda-
tion that secures it for all humans in the face of empiricist and other challenges
to human exceptionalism? How do you found a political order on a species-
based equality when the object of equality may not, strictly speaking, exist?
Lockean scholars try to resolve this issue by setting aside the question of
the moral relevance of species in favor of a capacity-based approach. Jeremy
Waldron’s defense and elaboration of Lockean human equality perhaps most
fully attempts this move, and so I will spend some time with it in order to
demonstrate problems with this solution. This move reverses the usual order
of operations; rather than looking at those we call human to discern shared
faculties, one starts instead from “a similarity among faculties that would be
robust enough” to support political equality and then attempts to find “what
class of creatures that applies to.”17 The crux of this solution revolves around
the following passage from the Essay:

when we say that Man is subject to Law: We mean nothing by Man, but a
corporeal rational Creature: What the real Essence or other Qualities of that
Creature are in this Case, is no way considered. . . . For were there a Monkey,
6 Political Theory 00(0)

or any other Creature to be found, that had the use of Reason, to such a degree,
as to be able to understand general Signs . . . he would no doubt be subject to
Law, and, in that Sense, be a Man. . . . The Names of Substances, if they be used
in them, as they should, can no more disturb Moral than they do Mathematical
Discourses: Where, if the Mathematicians speak of a Cube or Globe of Gold,
or any other Body, he has his clear settled Idea, which varies not, though it may,
by mistake, be applied to a particular Body . . . (E 3.11.16)

Thus, whether “Man” corresponds to a real essence matters no more for

moral discourse than a cube’s real existence does for mathematics. “Man”
simply refers to the quality of corporeal rationality, as Ruth Grant puts it,
that enables the being to respond to law. For Grant, corporeal rationality
establishes human equality, not as an account of the biological species “but
with respect to the purpose and meaning of particular moral propositions.”18
She concedes, however, the inevitability of gray areas; applying this idea to
specific cases inevitably creates ambiguity, especially given Locke’s intima-
tion that rationality exists by degree.
Waldron, in turn, also focuses on capacities rather than species but finds
corporeal rationality insufficient. First, admitting borderline cases entails an
“open texture” that problematically imbues “a fundamental indeterminacy in
what one is trying to say about equality.”19 Rationality is not an adequate
threshold, partly because Locke concedes that animals have some share of rea-
son. More fundamentally, Locke’s description of rationality as existing on a
spectrum jars against equality’s need for “a binary distinction” between those
inside and outside the given class.20 The challenge consists not only in discov-
ering a distinguishing quality but finding one that matters in moral terms. Not
all humans have to possess it equally; it can be a “range property” that enables
consideration as long as the being exists within this particular latitude.21
Waldron finds such a quality in Locke’s attribution of the ability to abstract to
humans—that is, when “ideas taken from particular beings become general
representatives of all of the same kind” (E 2.11.9). This faculty “puts a perfect
distinction betwixt man and brutes” because Locke sees no evidence that ani-
mals use symbolic language (E 2.11.10). Abstraction matters morally because
it enables one to have an idea of God, allowing a distinct relation to Him.
But does this solution resolve the problem? It is unclear to me how abstrac-
tion acts as a human universal, given that, on Locke’s terms, several groups of
people do not meet this standard, a charge that Waldron already levied at
Grant’s broader “corporeal rationality” solution—certain fetuses do not differ
significantly from vegetables (E 2.1.21); at a certain point in old age one’s
capacities are not much better than an oyster’s (E 2.9.14); and “Lunatics” and
“Idiots” cannot enjoy freedom because they lack understanding (TT II.60).22
Guha-Majumdar 7

Waldron admits that the narrower capacity for abstraction, too, excludes some
humans: “[Locke] quickly indicates that many who bear the nominal essence
of man lack the ability to abstract. Many of those we call idiots or naturals
‘cannot distinguish, compare, and abstract’” (E 2.11.120). Waldron then tries
to recuperate Locke, arguing that he invokes this capacity only as a nominal
claim useful for moral purposes—so it does not need to cover all cases.
However, the issue seems less like a rounding error than a significant
problem for Waldron’s, and Locke’s, account. As Stacey Clifford’s work on
the “capacity contract” and the role of disability in Locke’s work shows, not
only is the excluded category of “Idiocy” historically malleable and indeter-
minate, but basing political inclusion on cognitive capacity “empowers some
men with the examination and removal of defective others.”23 Moreover, this
capacity-based version of human equality occludes the ways that cognitive
and other vulnerabilities afflict all humans at various points in their lives.
Thus, range properties aside, differential capacity among those considered
human will haunt attempts to shape equality around some essential moral
capacity. Another problem, from the animal side, is that while Locke does
claim that abstraction perfectly divides man from brute, he also admits that a
speaking, reasoning nonhuman animal that “partaked not of the usual shape
of a Man,” would still not count within the taxonomic category (E 3.6.29).24
In sum, it seems puzzling that Waldron should rightly note that the binary
character of human equality precludes “open textures” but then lean on a
capacity with such momentous gray areas.
There is an additional, much deeper issue if we attend to an aspect of the
Essay that Waldron overlooks—its thoroughgoing modesty and skepticism
about our ability to know other creatures’ capacities: “There is not so con-
temptible a plant or animal that does not confound the most enlarged under-
standing” (E 3.6.9). Locke cautions against those who “think their span the
measure of all things,” given our “few and narrow inlets” of perception that
are “disproportionate to the vast whole extent of all beings” (E 4.3.23). He
even opens the possibility of a nonhuman-centered universe in which hitherto
unknown creatures with “assistance of senses and faculties more or perfecter
than we have, or different from ours” might exist (E 4.3.23). Even further, a
remarkable passage suggests that even mere matter might think:

We have the ideas of matter and thinking, but possibly shall never be able to
know whether any mere material being thinks or no; it being impossible for us,
by the contemplation of our own ideas, without revelation, to discover whether
Omnipotency has not given to some systems of matter, fitly disposed, a power
to perceive and think. . . . GOD can, if he pleases, superadd to matter a faculty
of thinking; since we know not wherein thinking consists, nor to what sort of
substances the Almighty has been pleased to give that power . . . (E 4.3.6)
8 Political Theory 00(0)

We simply do not know whether matter can think, because God’s design is
inscrutable. Moreover, we do not know what “thinking” actually is, and we
especially do not know which substances God has given this power. If
Locke’s modest skepticism goes as far as opening the possibility of mentality
in matter, it ought to imperil the surety of founding human equality and dis-
tinctiveness on abstraction or any other capacity.
On what, then, is human equality founded? The next section argues that
Lockean human equality relies on the sheer fact of dominion over animals,
which operates as a sign of human superiority that retroactively grounds
equality. The ambiguity between human and animal does not end up soften-
ing Lockean civil society’s tack toward nonhumans so much as produce a
particular sort of humanism.

The Dominion Covenant

Dominion plays a crucial role in structuring Locke’s political theory. Dominion
bridges his existential, cosmological concerns, the question of God’s domin-
ion and its earthly manifestation, and his political ones, the question of domin-
ion as legitimate order. Locke uses the word in multiple ways but all usages
tend to center on the scope of proper rule. The dominion covenant spans two
such senses: first, the divinely ordained rule that humans exert over nonhu-
mans, and second, the broader sense of the universe’s intrinsic order. However,
I will show that dominion is both more fragile than it first appears and yet still
indispensable for Locke’s political and existential commitments.
Early in the First Treatise, it becomes clear that much of Locke’s primary
task—refuting Robert Filmer’s justification of divine right and denial of
human equality—turns on how humanity relates to nonhuman creation. For
Filmer, the biblical directive in Genesis 1.28, to subdue the earth and exert
“Dominion over the Fish of the Sea, and over the Fowl of the Air, and over
every living thing that moveth upon the Earth” (TT I.23; italics in original),
applies exclusively to Adam and his heirs. Dominion, here, entails a private
right in a thing that includes total freedom to use it and exclude others from
use. Locke, in contrast, argues that Genesis 1.28 gives Adam “not Private
Dominion over the Inferior Creatures, but right in common with all Mankind”
(TT I.24). Locke thus reformulates dominion not as an exclusive right in but
a claim to a thing. If the Lockean world were a theater, as James Tully
explains with this Ciceronian metaphor, every individual could claim a seat
even if they were not directly occupying it.25 One may not take so many seats
so as to deny others’ claims, and if there are more theater-goers than seats, the
theater should be modified to accommodate everyone. In other words, people
may appropriate the world for their own use, but this appropriation is
Guha-Majumdar 9

regulated by the fundamental condition that the world belongs to humanity in

common.
This shift in conceptualizing dominion proves foundational for Locke’s
political theory because it establishes the prior conditions of politics and
property writ large. As Joshua Mitchell puts it, Locke claims that Filmer
misses how political power “must derive from the justification that all human
beings have to rule over other created things.”26 The crux of Locke’s dis-
agreement with Filmer, though, lies in whether authority over nonhuman
creatures rightfully belongs to few or all. In reformulating dominion, Locke
extends its reach by softening its edge: to “occupy a theater seat,” of course,
means subduing the Earth and its creatures for the sake of human conve-
nience. Stated otherwise, Lockean humanism democratizes the power to sub-
jugate nonhuman creation.
Locke extends dominion beyond biblical interpretation in an underread
chapter of the First Treatise—Ch. IX: Of Monarchy, by Inheritance from
Adam—in a move that has momentous implications for his political theory.
Locke begins by noting another problem in Filmer’s account of private
dominion: because it comes from an explicit verbal grant, one cannot know
who inherits Adam’s power in the present. And “if there be no Marks to
know him by,” then “it may be my self, as well as any other” (TT I.81).
Instead of solely rooting his own theory of dominion from this explicit
“Verbal Donation,” Locke argues that it comes from a prior law of nature
(TT I.86). Its basis lies in the fact that God planted in both humans and “all
other Animals” a “strong desire for Self-preservation,” and filled the world
with things fit for their survival and convenience. God then “spoke” to Man,
meaning he “directed [Man] by his Senses and Reason,” and did the same to
“inferior Animals by their Sense, and Instinct.” Natural dominion arises
because this “Reason, which was the Voice of God in him, could not but
teach him and assure him . . . that he followed the Will of his Maker, and
therefore had a right to make use of those Creatures, which by his Reason or
Senses he could discover would be serviceable thereunto.” Man therefore
has “a right to a use of these Creatures, by the Will and Grant of God” TT
II.86). This right, in turn, founds the right to property, which has its
“Original” in “the Right a Man has to use any of the Inferior Creatures” (TT
I.92; italics in original). Unlike Filmer’s murky lines of inheritance, then,
Locke explains dominion’s continuity via this naturalistic, originary account
of humanity’s primary intercourse with the world.
Locke’s account places humans and animals in a state of “primordial
equality,” as Dinesh Wadiwel puts it, because both have potentially clashing
desires for self-preservation in this originary state.27 From this initial equal-
ity, though, Locke implies that humanity prevails due to its access to reason.
Although, Locke abstains from the language of conflict or conquest, the fact
10 Political Theory 00(0)

that Man finds inferior creatures “serviceable” for his preservation suggests a
process of annulling animals’ simultaneous desires for self-preservation.
But a straightforward reading of this process, in which Man uses the
inherent voice of reason to rise above the fray of animal existence, raises
epistemological problems. Locke slips quite quickly from man’s “desire”
for self-preservation to his certain knowledge that reason or God permits
turning it into a “right.” Without revelation, how can Man know that God
endorses his victory and that this thing called reason is its cause? This prob-
lem is compounded given that Locke’s Essays on the Law of Nature argues
that the power to reason does not entail having intrinsic ideas (like domin-
ion or human superiority). Reason does not pronounce natural law but only
allows a situated power of reasoning that enables humans to discover and
interpret it. So how then could it initially declare humanity’s right to non-
humans?28 Moreover, if the beings Man encounters in the world are, as
Torrey Shanks writes, “a bundle of perceptions,” then “[w]hat category
they belong to—species of plant, animal, or object,” remain a matter of
judgment and not some innate feature of the natural world readily apparent
to the understanding.29 How battles for self-preservation in these originary
encounters turn into such clear lines of dominion that place humanity on
one side and animality on the other remains a mystery.
I argue that the basis of this “right” to use other creatures is the sheer fact
of their domination. Because humans “won” the battle—that is, found infe-
rior creatures “serviceable unto” their desire for preservation—they thereby
have a right to them. Douglas Casson’s explanation of Locke’s turn to the
“great book of nature” to interpret revelation and natural law helps here; the
fact that subordinated nonhumans “lost” is a sign of human superiority writ-
ten in nature’s book.30 Locke’s concern in this chapter, to determine the
“Marks” that signal who rules thus takes on special relevance. That is, the
existence of livestock, and therefore the process of rendering animals cap-
tive, signs and seals the dominion covenant, assuring man of his fundamental
identity as a superior being with the ear of God.
On this interpretation, dominating animals in particular becomes key. If
the right to property derives from human self-preservation, why should the
animals, in particular, form the “Original” of property, rather than, say, “the
Herbs” that Locke believes a vegetarian Adam to have subsisted on (§I.39),
or any other nonhuman entity?31 It is because Locke perceives animals’
unique proximity to humans via their desire for self-preservation that they
become property’s privileged locus. Lockean property, the appropriation of
the earth through mixing one’s labor with it, relies on overcoming resistance,
even the “resistance” of the tensile strength of an apple’s attachment to the
tree branch before being plucked. As Wadiwel writes, property exists because
Guha-Majumdar 11

the “[h]are does not simply give [itself] to the human, but must be chased and
appropriated through labour, in a risky process where the animal may easily
evade capture.”32 If a thing was merely given over to human consumption, no
real appropriation would occur. For Locke, animals present the greatest pow-
ers of resistance via their shared desires for self-preservation. The primordial
equality of self-preservation makes humanity’s subsequent victory more
noble. It therefore seems less that Locke objectifies animals as property than
that he animalizes objects. Dominion founds property because once human-
ity annuls animals’ wills, the rest of existence follows like a line of dominos.
If, as Locke later argues, labor is the origin of value, dominion over animals
is its ante-origin.
In sum, dominion over nonhuman animals founds Lockean human equal-
ity but itself rests on an unstable base; it depends on the sheer fact of conquest
over animals to annul their primordial, shared condition. I propose the frame
of a dominion covenant, prior and essential to the social compact, to interpret
this dynamic. The dominion covenant is a presumed “pact” amongst human-
ity, God, and the rest of existence where humans, privileged stakeholders in
God’s world, rule over “Inferior Creatures”—and any challenge to this order
requires punishment. The term covenant, rather than compact or contract,
signals the presence of a more originary, almost mystical, “agreement” sub-
tending the possibility of consensual exchange. Unlike earthly compacts,
agreements with God involve parties with radically different ontological sta-
tuses. God therefore shares something important with animals; as Jacques
Derrida notes, neither respond in our language, as understood in the terms of
Western humanism. Locke’s God may reveal some things but, fundamentally,
He is inscrutable. Neither God nor beast takes part in the “exchange, shared
speech, question and response” that contract requires.33 Whereas the forma-
tion of the social compact is often referred to as a conjectural history, the
covenant is closer to the retroactive presumption of an origin from which all
history proceeds.
The dominion covenant is not overtly named but works as a heuristic
device to discern that which consistently structures Locke’s political theory
and to help understand its contemporary relevance.34 It shares this feature
with the domination contract tradition—Mill’s “racial contract,” Carole
Pateman’s “sexual contract,” or Clifford’s “capacity contract.” Unlike these
devices, though, the dominion covenant does not signify a reciprocal, con-
sensual agreement to exclude certain people but rather concerns the existen-
tial underpinnings of such a reciprocal system. Further, whereas the
domination contract highlights the social contract’s failure to achieve its uni-
versal ideals, the dominion covenant works just as it should. That is, the
12 Political Theory 00(0)

domination contract works through the ruse of inclusion and equality but
animals present a different case because they are meant to be unequal.
The covenant, then, bridges the gap between pure theological presump-
tion and actually extant agreement. On one hand, Locke believes in a
divinely ordained, harmoniously interconnected, and hierarchically struc-
tured cosmos, in which God assigns every portion of creation to its appro-
priate realm with the capacities necessary for its purpose. Humans can
neither build nor rearrange this order, but they hold a unique, privileged
position within it because only they can bear witness to creation.35 On the
other hand, Locke conveys an “anxious skepticism” about how far one can
know the inner workings or full scope of this order.36 At various times in
Locke’s work, God appears as a principle of inscrutability: “The workman-
ship of the all-wise and powerful God in the great fabric of the universe,
and every part thereof, further exceeds the capacity and comprehension of
the most inquisitive and intelligent man” (E 3.6.9). Locke grappled with
this epistemological question throughout his life but never truly answered
it.37 This predicament intertwines with that posed by human equality;
Locke’s affirmation of human equality stems from his faith in a God-given
order in the universe where humans have an assigned role, but his anxious
skepticism gives rise to species nominalism and epistemological modesty
toward other beings.
To stabilize this divine hierarchy that humans can never know with cer-
tainty, Lockean human equality, I argue, requires an ongoing practice of
dominating animals. The combination of Locke’s strong faith in this hier-
archical order and his anxious skepticism creates the need for a sort of
ground. Locke does not simply declare human superiority and then orga-
nize politics around that claim. Rather, because the dominion covenant is
something both cosmologically presumed and something to be achieved
and enforced, human superiority requires continual enactment. As McClure
writes in a different context, humans do not simply possess human nature,
for Locke, but “they perform [it] insofar as they adopt the appropriate rules
of action in the proper context.”38 Here, that performance requires domi-
nating animals; if the right to dominion rests on nullifying animals’ desire
for self-preservation, then its continual existence depends on constantly
annulling that desire.
The fragility underlying this continual enactment not only affects non-
humans but sweeps up the humans that the covenant promises to protect.
This occurs because the core of the humanity protected by the covenant
only superficially appears as a similarity of capacities but more fully lies
in dominating animals. Hence, failure to properly respect this distance
becomes the grounds for legitimized domination in the name of equality.
Guha-Majumdar 13

The rest of this article traces this form of domination in the two key ave-
nues through which Locke declares political power to operate: property
and punishment (TT II.171).39 The next section examines property and the
following one punishment.

“. . . the Labour of those who Broke the Oxen”:

Property and the Dominion Covenant
Locke’s theory of property has been a touchstone for left critics of Locke;
here I focus on readings that emphasize its relationship to indigenous
dispossession.40 These interpretations often highlight Locke’s valorization of
sedentary agriculture over other modes of subsistence among indigenous peo-
ples. My reading of “Of Property” will highlight another dimension of Lockean
colonization that the dominion covenant foregrounds; Locke not only pre-
sumed sedentary agriculture superior to indigenous ways of life, but thought
so specifically of sedentary agriculture with tamed livestock. Lockean human
equality does not protect indigenous people from dispossession because
equality is rooted in subjugating animals. Colonization occurs not from a fail-
ure to live up to Lockean human equality but rather expresses its inner logic.
Although the references to animals in “Of Property” are fleeting, they
deserve attention for a few reasons. First, Locke continually reasserts domin-
ion throughout the chapter, either in the language of subduing the earth or
noting that it belongs to all humanity in common (TT II.25–27, 32, 34 35, 39).
Indeed, he begins the property chapter by straightaway affirming humanity’s
right to other creatures. Similar to the First Treatise’s derivation of property
from dominion, he notes that this right emerges from both revelation and
natural reason, the latter telling men that preservation entails, pointedly, a
right to “Meat and Drink” (II.25; my italics). Hence, Wadiwel notes, “animals
are not merely just one example of what might be considered property, but sit
at the very centre of the property right itself.”41 Furthermore, livestock cul-
ture’s hold on England contextually suggests that agriculturalist colonial
arguments must have assumed animal husbandry. The value extracted from
livestock is “literally incalculable”; without them, England would have fol-
lowed a wholly different trajectory.42
“Of Property” outlines a series of historical stages from a primitive state of
nature to commercial civil society. In the beginning, property originates when
man mixes his labor with the products of the earth. Locke aligns this first stage
with the “wild Indian,” and initiates an oft-overlooked rhetorical association
between the Indian and a particular animal— deer. Locke characterizes this
hunter-gatherer stage, which “knows no Inclosure,” via the “Fruit, or Venison,
which nourishes the wild Indian” (TT II.26). Later, he concludes the initial
14 Political Theory 00(0)

explanation of his labor theory of value by reaffirming that the “Law of reason
makes the Deer, that Indian’s who hath killed it” (TT II.30). Later, Locke inti-
mates the limits of relying on deer for subsistence. Articulating the idea that
appropriating more than what one can consume steals from the common stock
of mankind, Locke says that if “the Venison putrified, before he could spend
it, he . . . was liable to be punished” (TT II.37). Though Indians are not named,
the prior chain of association makes clear who he has in mind. These refer-
ences, in addition to the other named animal figures of the caught fish and the
hunted hare (TT II.29), link Indians to a particular relationship to animal life,
where they hunt wild creatures but do not properly control them.
Property’s second stage, and its primary mode, is appropriating the earth.
One claims property in land insofar as one encloses it and “Tills, Plants,
Improves, Cultivates” it—the beginning of sedentary agriculture (TT II.32).
For critics of Lockean colonialism, this stage is essential because setting cul-
tivation as the standard for property disregards the labor value of the skills
involved in hunting, gathering, and nonsedentary agriculture, as well as the
immense amount of time required to develop those skills.43 Consequently,
colonists can ignore indigenous land claims insofar as indigenous people do
not act in a properly “Industrious and Rational” manner (TT II.34). This
emphasis on land does not displace animals’ significance, though, and at this
stage a new animal appears for the first time: “whatsoever he enclosed, and
could feed, and make use of, the Cattle and Product was also his” (TT II.38;
my italics). In the First Treatise, Locke defined cattle as “such Creature as
were or might be tame, and so be the Private possession of Particular Men”
(TT I.25). With landed property, then, comes property in animals, requiring a
special sort of labor that Locke buries amongst a list of others—“the Labour
of those who broke the Oxen” (TT II.43).
When Locke introduces cattle, he cites a number of biblical episodes that
inadvertently demonstrate the unique role of animal property for coloniza-
tion. His citation of Genesis 13 follows English colonial apologists who fre-
quently used it to justify moving to “empty” places like the “new” world.44
This chapter tells the story of Lot moving away from Abraham, who was
“wealthy in livestock,” because the land could no longer sustain them, and in
particular, both their “flocks and herds.” Abraham thus says to Lot, “Let’s not
have any quarreling between you and me, or your herders and mine,” and
they part ways.45 Locke uses this passage to claim that, in the beginning,
people “wandered with their Flocks, and their Herds, which was their sub-
stance.” However, the greater peopling of the earth meant that they would
have “separated and inlarged their pasture” just as Lot and Abraham did.
Locke then cites Genesis 36 to the same effect: “for the same Reason Esau
went from his Father, and his Brother, and planted in Mount Seir” (TT II.38).
Guha-Majumdar 15

Here, the bible is quite explicit that Esau moves because the land could not
support them both “because of their livestock.” Animal property, then, drives
colonizing expansion because, unlike any other type of property in Locke,
they are sentient property on the move.
Another reason that animal chattel presents a special sort of property
concerns Locke’s statement that “the Grass my Horse has bit; the Turfs my
Servant has cut . . . become my Property” (TT II.28; italics in original).
Scholars, most famously C. B. Macpherson, have focused on the servant,
but in this context the horse signals animals’ unique status. Both servants
and horses extend the will of man, expanding his labor’s ambit. However,
unlike the way a plow might extend one’s labor, domesticated animals do
so due to their recognized sentience. Although Locke typically depicts
labor as the province of humanity, the horse complicates this division.
Horses are not full agents that carry out labor, but nor are they without
agency; they perform a certain actancy—an effectivity not quite considered
as sovereign action. Animals become especially valuable extensions of
human labor because they require some but not constant control. Whether
this grazing entitles the owner to the land or just the grass remains unknown,
though introducing livestock to what would be called the Americas did
drastically change ecological landscapes.46
What is known, though, is that colonization proceeded precisely through
this process of settlers vampirically extending their desire through livestock.
Without England’s social architecture for enclosing farm animals, settlers
had to allow livestock more latitude to roam.47 Though it might seem strange
that colonists who so valorized fixed settlement would rely on mobile chattel,
they “fully expected to harness their animals’ movements to serve the cause
of permanence.”48 Livestock upkeep “overshadowed every other factor driv-
ing the colonists’ insatiable quest for land.”49 When livestock trespassed onto
indigenous land, indigenous peoples sometimes killed or kept the creatures;
in turn settlers punished this “disrespect” for property. The appearance of
livestock told indigenous people that a veritable “juggernaut of English peo-
ple and animals” would soon follow.50 Cattle thus crucially figured in colo-
nial processes that Locke’s critics associate with landed property.
Finally, Locke’s chapter moves onto its last stage—money—with its own
relationship to animality. People invent money because it enables more
appropriation with less spoilage. Money produces a properly human com-
munity by creating a common market for exchange, and so places where “the
Inhabitants thereof not having joined with the rest of Mankind, in . . . the Use
of their common Money” risk producing unnecessary waste (TT II.45). The
money stage also references cattle, but now as stock (and the shared etymo-
logical roots of cattle, chattel, and capital becomes especially striking here).
When Locke famously claims that “Thus in the beginning all the World was
16 Political Theory 00(0)

America” (TT II.49), the antecedent characterization of America implied by

the “thus” describes a land without cattle. A few lines before, he asks with a
sardonic tinge:

What would a Man value Ten Thousand, or an Hundred Thousand Acres of

excellent Land, ready cultivated, and well stocked too with Cattle, in the middle
of the in-land Parts of America, where he had no hopes of Commerce . . . to
draw Money to him by the Sale of the Product? (TT II.48; my italics)

No money, no livestock, no improvement. Cattle, in contrast to the Indian’s

spoiled venison, are more appropriate for a monied age because one “stores”
value in their bodies, and control over their reproduction makes them indefi-
nitely multipliable for the world market. To join the properly human com-
munity, then, nations must give up lifestyles oriented around venison in favor
of keeping cattle on a massive scale.
The path to civil society thus requires a progressive vision of human–
animal relationality, where owning more livestock correlates with civiliza-
tional improvement. The penurious Indian must make do with hunted venison
while developed societies keep meat ready-to-hand. Locke thus voices an old
European narrative that measures proper human civilization in terms of the
capability to engineer life-forms.51 This attitude mirrored less systematic but
structurally similar on-the-ground political justifications for land expropria-
tion in America.52 Early colonists often interpreted indigenous peoples’ lack
of domesticated farm animals as civilizational backwardness.53 (Some indig-
enous peoples did relate to some animals in ways that could be described as
domestication, but those relationships bore scant resemblance to the inten-
sive, large-scale systems of English livestock.)54 Neither Locke nor the colo-
nists could countenance the reasonableness of alternate cosmologies that
rendered animate chattel an incoherent concept, as Anderson argues was true
for many Algonquian peoples.55 Colonists, however, believed that only such
technologies could maximize the land’s potential in ways unavailable to
indigenous people lacking cattle.56
This reading suggests an alternative understanding of human equality. By
way of contrast, Waldron accepts that Locke’s property chapter has troubling
colonial implications, but concludes that Locke at least still sees indigenous
people as people. Partly this is because Locke encourages religious toler-
ance of indigenous “paganism” and condemns using religious difference to
justify expropriation.57 But perhaps Waldron has proven too much. That is,
his insistence that Locke remains committed to human equality hints at the
paucity of human equality’s protections. One can be equally human and still
suffer dispossession—dispossession, in fact, in the name of humanity. The
ontotheological dimension of the dominion covenant overrides more
Guha-Majumdar 17

surface-level claims of religious toleration. The dominion covenant makes

clear that human equality requires falling into line with a particularized
model of human superiority that declares itself as universal and casts alterna-
tive ecological relationships as deviant. “The Labour of those who broke the
Oxen” therefore bears more weight than Locke admits—it is the only mode
of labor that both expands material property and expresses human lordship.
Propertied humanity is the dominion covenant’s “carrot” in that following
the covenant’s demand for dominion offers the promise of recognized prop-
erty. But the covenant also threatens with the “stick” of punishment and slav-
ery for those who seem to ally with brute animality, as the next section shows.
If property expands dominion’s ambit, punishment wards off encroachments
against this fragile order. Human equality’s purported foundationalism, its
need for a binary distinction between those within and without the order of
equality, requires a harsh response against equality’s gray zones.

“Noxious Creatures” and the State of War

Punishment poses a unique problem for Lockean human equality: it both
makes it possible and presents the only way to act against humans in ways
otherwise prohibited by that very equality. Punishment makes human equal-
ity possible because it enables recourse against infringements on others’
humanity. If natural law maintains mankind as “one Society distinct from all
other Creatures,” punishment wards off slippages into the creaturely realm.
On the other side, punishment not only allows “one Man” to have “a Power
over another” (TT II.8) but it also provides the only legitimate avenue by
which to enslave another.58 Lockean punishment, in short, works as follows:
in the state of nature, the power to punish activates when one person tries to
harm another’s life and thereby inaugurates a state of war (TT II.18). The
aggrieved may “destroy” the aggressor (TT II.16), and this power applies
beyond murders and enslavers; the innocent one may “kill a Thief” even if the
latter “has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any design upon his Life”
because, in using “Force, so to get him into his power,” the thief might also
take everything else (TT II.18). What’s more, the “innocent” may enslave
aggressors because, as personae non-grata, they lose nothing from becoming
slaves. Slavery is “the State of War continued, between a lawful Conquerour,
and a Captive” (TT II.24; italics in original). This captivity entails despotic
power, “an Absolute, Arbitrary Power one Man has over another, to take
away his Life, whenever he pleases” (TT II.172).
If cattle and deer dominate Locke’s account of property, the animal figure
that governs punishment is the “noxious brute”—predatory animals like
“lyons,” “tygers,” and wolves. Lockean punishment thus raises deep prob-
lems for human equality not only because it sanctions slavery but because he
18 Political Theory 00(0)

outright seems to dehumanize criminals, constantly aligning them with these

“noxious” creatures (TT II.10, II.11, II.16, II.172, II.181). Transgressing
natural law violates not only individuals but humanity as a whole. As such,
any human may punish such a “trespass against the whole Species” (TT II.8)
for the same reason they may kill a “Wolf or a Lyon”—such criminals “are not
under the ties of the Common Law of Reason, have no other Rule, but that of
Force and Violence” and so are like “Beasts of Prey, those dangerous and
noxious Creatures, that will be sure to destroy him, whenever he falls into
their Power” (TT II.16).
The alignment between criminal and noxious brute has raised a ques-
tion for defenders and critics of Locke alike, one representatively voiced
by Mary Nyquist: “why does Locke so stress the transgressor’s monstrous
subhumanity?”59 This question in turn raises the issue of why Lockean pun-
ishment seems so severe. Waldron’s defense of Locke notes that he does not
know “how to reconcile it with the background theory of basic equality.”60
He does suggest a possible reading of punishment that ameliorates some of
its severity—namely, Locke’s emphasis on proportionality and the power to
pardon suggest that in most cases criminals are not totally cast out of moral
consideration—but admits that “it is not necessarily an attractive account.”61
More critical treatments of Lockean punishment do challenge his production
of the criminal as subhuman.62 However, none really examines the nonhuman
referents that anchor this process, and thus the issue for both them and for
defenders becomes rather one-dimensional: does Locke really intend to onto-
logically degrade criminals such that they functionally become animals? If
Lockean humanism were simply a matter of degree, then this linear human–
animal continuum makes sense. As it stands, though, it misses the complexity
of Locke’s humanism. What role do noxious brutes play in the Lockean besti-
ary, as opposed to say, deer or cattle?
The dominion covenant, I will show, illuminates the role of “noxious
brutes” in Locke’s system, which in turn explains the necessity of severe
punishment. The paradoxical role of punishment as both guarantor of human
equality and a key site of dehumanization emerges from the fact that the basis
of human equality is the sheer fact of dominating animals. In this respect,
wild predatory animals introduce instability and threaten the dominion cov-
enant by their very existence, as I will argue. With regard to wild animals,
Locke introduces a structure of criminality into existence that exceeds the
human realm. The human criminal, in turn, must become subject to a sort of
civil death insofar as they enter into a sort of alliance with these predatory
animals and the broader sense of criminal animality they represent.
Of the three explicitly named creatures, we can start with wolves, even
though they only appear three times in the Two Treatises (TT I.56; II.16;
II.228). First, the white, Western political tradition attributes them with a
Guha-Majumdar 19

peculiar ethno-symbology of treachery and evil, as I have noted. Moreover,

only wolves would have come into contact with the average European or
Euro-American. Finally, they pose a distinct problem in Locke’s work. The
threat of lions and tigers in common folklore was their capability to kill
humans, and they were sometimes regarded as valiant, if fearsome, figures.
Wolves, by contrast, have been associated less with honor than, as Jacques
Derrida notes, deception.63 And unlike tigers or lions, wolves rarely attack
humans; in fact, they may have been the first nonhuman animals with whom
humans had sustained social contact.64 Locke’s denial of the possibility of
“Society nor Security” with wolves, then, seems peculiar (TT II.11).
This context illuminates the full significance of the fact that around 1500,
a little more than a century before Locke’s birth, the English carried out the
world’s first wolf extermination in a given territorial jurisdiction.65 Settlers
then inherited anti-wolf attitudes when they once again encountered the crea-
tures. The 1656 wolf bounty legislation, mentioned in the introduction,
emerged in this setting. Settlers throughout the colonies initiated mass wolf-
culling campaigns and often tortured wolves, embroidering their deaths with
ritualistic symbolism.66 For wolves, then, English settlers were the true nox-
ious creatures with whom one could have neither society nor security.
Why this fervor to slaughter, this ritualization of death as if torturing a
prisoner of war, despite the absence of any significant threat to settler life?
Wolves may not kill humans often, but they do “steal” livestock and thus
ignore the covenant whereby humanity’s right to self-preservation entails
privileged access to other forms of life.67 Like a nonhuman version of the
Lockean thief, wolves threaten to violate the fundamental existential under-
pinnings of civil society. Unlike most human thieves, though, wolves steal
not just any property but the foundation of property itself—livestock—
intimately challenging the hegemonic sense of English identity as a civilized
people distinct from savage primitives and nonhuman creatures. In this con-
text, wolf-culling, like oxen-breaking, not only protects material wealth but
reasserts human sovereignty.
The wolf offers a privileged example of the broader, unacknowledged
shadow that beasts of prey cast on dominion. In the Two Treatises, in fact,
these creatures seem to both have no right to exist while also being part of
God’s creation. In the First Treatise, Locke avers that God’s benediction to
Noah, that “the fear of you, and the dread of you . . . shall be upon every
Beast,” expresses dominion “as fully as may be” (TT I.36; italics in original).
In this respect, wild predatory animals pose a conundrum. If, in an orderly
cosmos, humans appropriate inferior creatures when needed, what of the
“Tygers” who, as Dunn puts it, “occasionally appropriate men for their con-
sumption?”68 The mere existence of such creatures—disobedient and unafraid
of humans—threatens this neat order with “a disturbing opacity in the divine
20 Political Theory 00(0)

purposes.” Locke’s insinuation that one may destroy noxious creatures gratu-
itously, without transgression, attempts to restore his presumed sense of
dominion. Locke thus joins a European tradition that identifies the begin-
nings of human history with the act of combining forces to defeat wild
beasts.69 Because wild beasts are a sort of existential criminal, humans come
into the world at war, on a species level, with them.70
Arguing that Locke sees noxious brutes as existential criminals may seem
inappropriate given that Locke thinks that beasts do not choose force but funda-
mentally incarnate it. If they were unreasoning automata, it would make little
sense to say that they “violate” the dominion covenant. And while Locke does
mostly present these creatures as solely ruled by instinctive force, without care
or decency, he also complicates this picture. First, we already saw how the Essay
Concerning Human Understanding considers many animals to have some rea-
son rather than being purely driven by instinct. Second, the First Treatise favor-
ably compares the behavior of lions and wolves to the human behavior that
Filmer sanctions. Filmer’s claim that fathers have absolute power over their
children justifies selling and killing them, but even “[t]he Dens of Lions and
Nurseries of Wolves know no such Cruelty.” Here, Locke speaks almost glow-
ingly of the tender parenting of creatures he later deems noxious: “They will
Hunt, Watch, Fight, and almost Starve for the Preservation of their Young, never
part with them, never forsake them.” Strikingly, he argues that they “obey God
and Nature.” He then connects the duties of man with this animal obeisance:
“And is it the Priviledge of Man alone to act more contrary to Nature than the
Wild and most Untamed part of the Creation?” (TT I.57). Locke thus imbues
beasts of prey with an ambiguous sense of agency. On one hand, they instinc-
tively incarnate force and unreason. On the other, Locke cracks open a space for
action in accordance with nature. This ambiguity accords with the covenant fig-
ure’s sense of indistinction between inherent presumption and consensual agree-
ment. Noxious creatures can, then, violate the dominion covenant and be held
responsible for it, even though they do not “choose” to do so.
In sum, “lyons,” “tygers,” and wolves imbue the dominion covenant with a
sense of frailty. They demonstrate indifference to human supremacy by threat-
ening human lives and livestock, refusing to live in “fear and dread” of human-
ity. This frailty—what Dunn calls an embarrassing “opacity” in God’s
intention—pushes the Lockean combination of faith in a harmonious cosmo-
logical order and skepticism about knowing that order at a tender spot. Locke
thereby affirms the right to kill noxious creatures on sight to shore up the human
community’s coherence, superiority, and right to inspire dread in animals.
We can now understand the severity of Lockean punishment. Nyquist
notes that despite early modern political theory’s obsession with origins,
Locke does not explain how the proper subject acquires despotic power.71 I
Guha-Majumdar 21

am suggesting, however, that the “Original” for despotic power stems from
the wild beast’s violation of the dominion covenant. If natural law constitutes
human community, and that community emerges via a war against noxious
beasts, then violating natural law brings humanity’s war with disobedient
animals inside the gates of human society—a wolf-man suddenly emerges in
the center of the polis. The criminal is not so much exterior to humanity as a
traitor to it. It is permissible to do whatever desired to one who, in crossing
enemy lines and becoming a species-traitor, attacks something so fundamen-
tal. Moreover, punishment’s severity, its endpoint in slavery, does not contra-
dict Lockean human equality but rather displays its autoimmune logic—the
way its systems of defense rebound against the structure as a whole. Reifying
humanity as a coherent entity requires guarding its borders against unruly
human behavior. For a human equality founded on dominion, the metric for
unruliness concerns one’s willingness to stay as far as possible from the nox-
ious creatures nipping at the walls of Fortress Humanity.

Conclusion
I have argued that Locke resolves problems in his account of human equality
via a dominion covenant, in which the substantive foundation of human
equality is the sheer fact of dominating animals. Simultaneously given as an
article of faith and something achieved and enforced as an “agreement,” the
covenant requires an ongoing practice of dominating nonhumans, particu-
larly animals, and humans that stray too far from this order. Thus, coloniza-
tion and slavery proceed by the very same process meant to guarantee
universal human regard. That is, Lockean racism fulfills, rather than deviates
from, this vision of human equality. I traced this dynamic through two ave-
nues. First, through livestock, which are the foundation of property and which
help govern colonial dispossession and assimilation. Second, for those that
do not submit to a proper image of humanity, Locke reserves the fate of
wolves—violence without reserve. As prefigured by Virginia’s 1656 Act,
Lockean civil society is the ongoing process of exterminating free-ranging
wolves to develop supposedly tame cattle.
The challenges to human equality that Locke encountered are not quite the
same as ours, and some he worried about may not worry us. But the difficulty
of trying to establish an insuperable moral line that keeps all humans in and
all nonhumans out have only intensified in the ensuing years. In the face of
such challenges, some understandably wish to hold on to the idea of a foun-
dational human equality because it seems difficult to find a language to con-
demn racism, sexism, ableism, etc. without it.72 Radical critics of Locke, too,
often implicitly hold on to his species-egalitarianism even if other aspects of
22 Political Theory 00(0)

his thought trouble them. While in this space I cannot offer an alternative
language, my reading of Locke has shown how this human equality—reliant
on an unstable foundation that requires constant reenactment—will not suf-
fice. Even in one of the most venerated texts in this tradition, human equality
and exceptionalism remain fragile.
John Dunn concludes his classic work on the importance of religion for
Locke as follows: “We have, it seems, come to accept in the broadest of terms
the politics of Locke but, while doing so, we have firmly discarded the reasons
which alone made them seem acceptable even to Locke. It is hard to believe
that this combination can be quite what we need today.”73 We can transpose
Dunn’s concern into the terms of the dominion covenant; we live in an era
with world-historical levels of violence toward humans and nonhumans, but
one that does not explicitly invoke humanity’s theological privilege. So, what
forms of the dominion covenant might lurk today under the guise of secular
humanist belief, even in its most emancipatory articulations?

Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jane Bennett and two anonymous reviewers for their extensive comments
throughout the process. I would also like to thank Robbie Shilliam, Dinesh Wadiwel,
Lars Cornelissen, Melayna Lamb, Thomas Donahue, and a workshop at the University
of Brighton School of Humanities, organized by Mark Devenney and Clare Woodford,
for thoughtful comments on earlier drafts.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-
tion of this article.

ORCID iD
Jishnu Guha-Majumdar https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7762-4044

Notes
  1. Virginia Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed
Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107–8.
 2. Ibid.
 3. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988). All further citations in-text.
Guha-Majumdar 23

  4. The only exceptions, to my knowledge, are Dinesh Wadiwel, The War against
Animals (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2015), and Kay Anderson, Race and the Crisis
of Humanism (London: Routledge, 2007). Some animal rights scholarship notes
Locke’s anthropocentrism but does not reinterpret his political theory through it.
  5. Charles Mills, “The Domination Contract” in Contract and Domination, eds.
Carole Pateman and Charles Mills (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), 82.
  6. Jeremy Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 1.
 7. John Dunn, The Political Thought of John Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1969), 99.
  8. James Tully, Discourse on Property: John Locke and his Adversaries (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980), 45.
 9. Diego Rossello, “Hobbes and the Wolf-Man: Melancholy and Animality in
Modern Sovereignty,” New Literary History 43 (2012): 258.
10. Kirstie McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 57.
11. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. D. Woozley
(New York: Meridian, 1964). All further citations in-text.
12. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, ed. Ruth Grant (Indianapolis;
Hackett, 1996), 16, 90–91, 116–17. (§13, 116, 156).
13. Colleen Boggs, Animalia Americana: Animal Representations and Biopolitical
Subjectivity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 138–43.
14. Josh Milburn, “Nonhuman Animals as Property Holders: An Exploration of
the Lockean Labour-Mixing Account,” Environmental Values 26, no. 5 (2017):
629–48.
15. I follow scholars like Waldron, Dunn, Torrey Shanks, and Ruth Grant in rejecting
the “two Lockes” thesis—that the Essay and the Two Treatises are irreconcilable.
The dominion covenant, indeed, presents one way of bridging each text’s under-
pinnings. Also, given my eye toward the present, I agree with Waldron that even
if Locke meant to separate his philosophy and politics, we are under no such
obligation. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 50.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 66.
18. Ruth Grant, John Locke’s Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987), 31.
19. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 75n.
20. Ibid., 72.
21. Ibid., 76–77.
22. Ibid., 73.
23. Stacy Clifford, “The Capacity Contract: Locke, Disability, and the Political
Exclusion of ‘Idiots.’” Politics, Groups, and Identities 2, no. 1 (2014): 97.
24. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 75.
25. James Tully, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1993), 108–9.
24 Political Theory 00(0)

26. Joshua Mitchell, Not by Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early
Modern Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 82.
27. Wadiwel, War Against Animals, 152.
28. John Locke, Essays on the Law of Nature, ed. Wolfgang von Leyden (Oxford:
Oxford University Press 1989), 115.
29. Torrey Shanks, Authority Figures: Rhetoric and Experience in John Locke’s
Political Thought (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014), 54.
30. Douglas Casson, Liberating Judgment: Fanatics, Skeptics, and John Locke’s
Politics of Probability (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 94–124.
31. In I.92, Locke refers to “Inferior Creatures” (my italics) as property’s origi-
nal. I interpret this to mean animals in particular. First, earlier he disaggregated
the biblical term “Living Creatures” into specifically animal categories: cattle,
beasts, and reptiles (I.25). Second, in the key section I.86, Locke uses “Inferior
Animals” and “Creatures” interchangeably.
32. Wadiwel, The War Against Animals, 153.
33. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2011), 55.
34. In this respect, the dominion covenant works similarly to what McClure calls a
“metatheoretical given.” Judging Rights, 52.
35. McClure calls this an “architecture of order.” Judging Rights, 29.
36. Ibid., 7.
37. Ibid., 38; Dunn, Political Thought, 25.
38. McClure, Judging Rights, 51.
39. See also ibid., 130.
40. Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The Defence of English Colonialism
(Clarendon Press, 1996); Tully, An Approach, 137–78.
41. Wadiwel, War Against Animals, 147.
42. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London: Penguin Books, 1991), 25.
43. Tully, An Approach, 156.
44. Arneil, John Locke and America, 111–12.
45. All biblical citations from the New International Version.
46. Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 116.
47. Ibid., 113–14.
48. Ibid., 83.
49. Ibid., 232.
50. Ibid., 230.
51. Anderson, Race and the Crisis of Humanism, 46.
52. Tully, An Approach; Arneil, John Locke and America.
53. Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 8, 62, 79.
54. Ibid., 33–34.
55. Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 38. In this space I am unable to do justice to
the complexity of Algonquian ideas concerning human relationships with other
creatures.
56. Ibid., 8.
Guha-Majumdar 25

57. Waldron, God, Locke, Equality, 167–68. I would argue that this has more to do
with delegitimizing Spanish modes of dispossession through religion in favor of
English methods. See Arneil, John Locke and America, 71.
58. See also McClure, Judging Rights, 208.
59. Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and
Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 335.
60. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 143.
61. Ibid., 145. Moreover, Waldron admits, it is impossible to rule out the more severe
version.
62. Dilts, “To Kill a Thief”; Sinja Graf, “‘A Trespass against the Whole Species’:
Universal Crime and Sovereign Founding in John Locke’s Second Treatise of
Government,” Political Theory 46, no. 4 (2018), 560–85; Nyquist, Arbitrary
Rule. See also McClure, who argues that since human nature is enacted and not
simply possessed, this process is unsurprising because “it is structurally man-
dated by [criminals’] act of transgression.” Judging Rights, 152.
63. Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign, 2, 4.
64. Indeed, wolves may have actually influenced the social ethics of early human
groups, making them more accurately a condition of possibility for human soci-
ality. Wolfgang M. Schleidt and Michael D. Shalter, “Co-Evolution of Humans
and Canids,” Evolution and Cognition 9, no.1 (2003), 58. On the key role of
wolves in political theory, see: Derrida, Beast and the Sovereign; Rafi Youatt,
“Sovereignty and the Wolves of Isle Royale,” in Political Theory and the Animal/
Human Relationship, eds. Vincent Jungkunz and Judith Grant (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2011); Ghassan Hage, Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (Cambridge:
Polity, 2017).
65. Jon Coleman, Vicious: Wolves and Men in America (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2006), 8.
66. Anderson, Creatures of Empire, 101.
67. Coleman, Vicious, 11.
68. Dunn, Political Thought, 89.
69. Thomas, Man and the Natural World, 28; Neal Wood, John Locke and Agrarian
Capitalism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 58.
70. See Wadiwel, War Against Animals, for a fuller discussion of dominion, prop-
erty, and war.
71. Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule, 344.
72. Waldron, God, Locke, and Equality, 63.
73. Dunn, Political Thought, 267.

Author Biography
Jishnu Guha-Majumdar is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at
Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada. He received his PhD in political theory from
Johns Hopkins University. His work examines the intersections between racism and
anthropocentrism. He has also published in Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender,
and the Black International and Qui Parle.